Fallacies

01 Jun 2021 | philosophy

TODO: need to complete

A fallacy is a violation of the laws of logic.

Strawman

Misrepresenting or constructing someone’s argument to make it easier to attack.

Presuming that a real or percieved relationship between things means that one is the cause of the other.

The rise in sea levels and the number of films that Nicholas Cage were in per year are both rising therefore Nike Cage causes rise in sea level.
People who take mushrooms think the see deities, spirits, and demons so that must be how Moses got his revelation at Mt. Sinai, therefore religion comes from people taking mushrooms. 1) There’s no evidence Moses was doing shrooms in the desert and 2) there’s no evidence the God that Moses encountered is the same as the kind of diety most people who do shrooms think they discovered.

Asserting that if we allow A to happen, then Z will consequently happen too, therefore A should not happen.

When religion propegates then we get people who dont follow their own dogmas and we end up with hyppocrites and priests who want to molest children. It doesn’t follow that beacuse we are allowing religion that the molestation of children will happen, unless the religion advocates molestation.
Allowing gay marriage will lead to degenerate behavior is NOT a slippery slope because we can actually show that certain moral actions do follow from a society given over to relativism.

Attacking your opponent’s character or personal traits in an attempt to undermine their argument.

Bill Cosby says 2+2=4 but we dont have to accept his mathematical principles because he drugged women.

Moving the goalposts or making up exceptions when a claim is shown to be false.

The uniformitarian principle most naturalists assume. This is the idea that the natural world has always operated in exactly the same way it does now. For example, radiometric dataing and the decay rate has always been the same to get the results we think proves billions of years. Another example, the light refraction in trying to date the universe based on starlight measurements to prove the age of the universe. However, they engage in special pleading when it comes to the distance of the Moon from the Earth because if the Moon is moving away from the Earth at the rate it does today then if we go back in time then the Moon hits the Earth fairly quickly in the scheme they have. They will not assume uniformitarianism when it comes to the rate of Moon movement away from Earth, but in other cases we must assume uniformitarianism in the geologic record.
Edward Johns claimed to be psychhic, but when his abilities were tested under proper scientific conditions, they magically disappeared. Edward explained this saying that one had to have faith in his abilities for them to work.

Asking a question that has an assumption built into it so that it can’t be answered without appearing guilty.

Non Sequitur – a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement.
Generic Fallacy – Presuming something based solely on someone’s or something’s history, origin, or source rather than its current meaning or context.